Strategic Action Plans are proposals for Fellow-led initiatives to advance biotechnology in alignment with the public interest.

A key output from LEAP is the growing collection of Strategic Action Plans shared publicly on this site. Taking the form of “white” or “vision” papers, Strategic Action Plans aim to articulate compelling and actionable visions for responsible leadership in biotechnology. They serve to raise the visibility of Fellows’ ideas so that they may solicit feedback and support, and showcase what can result from investment in leadership development.

2015 Strategic Action Plans

Cameron Keys

Research universities are de facto science and technology policy laboratories attempting to reconcile powerful incentives to accelerate R&D commercialization with ethical and democratic commitments to responsible innovation (RI).

Sarah Richardson

Only two microbes are practically available to nonprofit researchers as platforms for genetic modification, a restriction that has profoundly delayed the progress of synthetic biology. A tiny fraction of interesting microbes has genetic toolkits—and though it is possible to build toolkits, current incentive structures in research and biotechnology seem to preclude the involvement of academic scientists or the disclosure of methods or strains by industrial scientists.

Sanjana J. Ravi & Amor A. Menezes

We propose identifying how US federal agencies can integrate synthetic biological technologies to enhance biosecurity. Our proposal is motivated by inadequate technical and policy approaches to tackle biological threats (including naturally occurring outbreaks, accidental contaminations and bioreleases, and bioterrorism) that jeopardize public health and national security.

Nicola J. Patron

World population is growing by 74 million people per year. We may need to produce as much as 70 percent more food by 2050 without increasing agricultural resources. Bioengineering is not a silver bullet for preventing food scarcity—synthetic biology cannot make the rain come or ensure fair distribution of food, but it can be used to detect and respond to disease outbreaks, reduce the use of agrochemicals, and improve nutritional value.

Jon Marles-Wright

Consideration of biosafety and compliance with local rules and relevant legislation is a vital aspect of good practice in any laboratory that performs molecular biology. With advances in DNA synthesis and assembly, recombineering, and the widespread adoption of Cas nucleases for genome editing, our ability to programme cellular behaviours is advancing at an unprecedented rate.

Kevin M. Esvelt

RNA-guided gene drives have the power to single-handedly alter shared ecosystems, yet they are accessible to individual researchers. 1 Applications of gene drive 2 and other ecotechnologies could save millions of lives and numerous species, but development, social acceptance, and use pose ethical and practical challenges due to the difficulty of obtaining communal consent.

Sean Ward

Rapid advances in the enabling technologies for genome editing are sparking a global dialogue about the potential consequences of these technologies. In particular, concerns exist about the potential biosecurity implications of engineering, previously only within the remit of state-sponsored bodies, becoming available to well-trained individuals and small groups.

Keira Havens, Jason Kakoyiannis, Mike Koeris & Ted Fjällman

The plan for responsible biological innovation sounds simple in theory: design thoughtfully, communicate effectively, listen carefully, and provide tangible benefits to all stakeholders. In practice, however, we have seen this process fail time and time again as companies, consumers, and advocacy groups talk at cross purposes.

Kim de Mora

iGEM teams are known for incredible innovation and for achieving an amazing volume of work in short periods of time. Though several teams have gone on to form startups, they represent a small percentage of the overall number of participants. Incubators and accelerators for startups exist, but not all iGEM teams have fully formed ideas or are ready or able to drop out of college to participate. The iGEM Entrepreneur program aims to fill the gap in both time and knowledge for iGEM teams who want to start a business but aren’t quite ready.

Lalitha S. Sundaram

The promise and potential of synthetic biology in addressing some of the world’s most critical problems is being increasingly recognised the world over. Synthetic biology products and projects could hold the key to sustainably “heal us, feed us, and fuel us.”

James Fields

Synthetic DNA libraries can be used to rapidly engineer novel biological systems. Unfortunately, many young synthetic biology practitioners don’t know what a synthetic DNA library is or how it can be used. To address this problem, we will ship a synthetic DNA library to every International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) team, along with accompanying educational material. My company, LabGenius, will cover the cost of the design and synthesis of the synthetic DNA library. I would like to request $2,500 in LEAP Catalyst grant funding to pay for the design and production of the accompanying educational materials.

Edward Perello

A growing community of software developers and designers is becoming increasingly inspired by and eager to get involved in biology. Though participating in the “next digital revolution” is attractive, lateral entrants to the field face a steep learning curve before they can effectively discuss many core concepts of biological engineering with professional synthetic biologists.

Karen Ingram & A.W. Betten

Surveying public opinion on GMOs and genetic modification reveals responses like: I don’t know. No clue. Complicated. Health. Improvement. Doubt. Wrong. Food. Scary. A Google image search on the term “synthetic biology” results in textbook charts, dissected bacterium, and gears—society doesn’t seem to be part of the picture.

2012 Strategic Action Plans

Marc Facciotti

The US bioeconomy generated an estimated $300 billion of revenue in 2011. Advances in foundational technologies, such as synthetic biology, are lowering barriers to biotechnology, enabling a growing number of people to participate. Technological advances and the democratization of biotechnology present opportunities for economic growth, particularly in areas like small-scale, distributed biomanufacturing. In addition to growth, technical advances springing from the bioeconomy also present great hope for reducing the severity of some of our nation’s most pressing financial challenges, particularly those related to the increasing costs of healthcare delivery and energy.

Ellen Jorgensen

Community biolabs are a natural environment for thoughtful examination and discussion of the implications and ethics surrounding cutting-edge DNA-based technologies. Creating a network of such spaces could have a profound effect at the grassroots level on both science education and the public perception of synthetic biology. Organizations such as Genspace have demonstrated that reframing the synthetic biology laboratory facility as a neighborhood resource can demystify and democratize biotechnology, allowing it to have a more open relationship with the eventual end user.

Christina Agapakis

Over the past decade, synthetic biology has disciplined itself. Synthetic biology aims to make biotechnology a “true engineering discipline,” through the application and adoption of engineering design principles. As biology and engineering have merged in synthetic biology, the blurring of the boundary between science and technology has created a new discipline, complete with its own boundaries and its own discursive methods for creating, reinforcing, and enforcing those boundaries.

Synthetic biology offers significant promise for advances in health and medicine, food and energy production, and environmental sustainability. Realizing this potential requires continued commitment to driving bio-innovation, ensuring biosafety and biosecurity, and building a robust bioeconomy. This strategic action plan proposes the formation of an International Synthetic Biology Society to support the responsible development and deployment of synthetic biology in the public interest.

Derek Lindstrom and Nathan Hillson

An effective approach to building relationships between culturally distinct organizations is through immersive experience. This strategic plan proposes to create an opportunity to place academic scientists into an industry-based postdoctoral position without jeopardizing their ability to compete effectively for tenure-track academic positions. In essence, we are offering a return ticket to academics interested in gaining industrial experience. The mechanism that we present is a modification of the NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award (the K99).

Ryan Ritterson

While the synthetic biology community enjoys support from a majority of people aware of its activities, it remains unknown to most of the nation. Further, policy makers do not rely on a coherent vision of synthetic biology in order to make regulatory decisions. This leaves a partial vacuum in the public decision-making capacity for these new technologies that could stunt their development.

Walter Valdivia

New technologies create, at once, the need for regulation and resistance to it within regulatory agencies. Each bureaucracy is bound by law to protect public health and the environment but also seeks to avoid the risks of expanding the scope of its authority and having to mediate the concomitant political controversies. Hence, the paradox of regulating emerging technologies.

Nathan Hillson

Coherent Block Funding is a mechanism for government, industry, and institutional agencies to support and coordinate the assessment of environmental risks posed by genetically engineered microbes, and the development of strategies to mitigate these risks. In short, a single block of funding would support several testing facilities in addition to multiple individual investigators developing mitigation strategies.

Ryan Morhard

This Strategic Action Plan proposes convening essential stakeholders within the synthetic biology and biosecurity community to participate in a biosecurity tabletop exercise meant to form the basis for a high-production web-based learning tool designed to enhance learning by enabling students, scientists, policymakers, and emergency professionals to virtually simulate participation in such an exercise.

Michal Glaldzicki, Sarah Munro, Patrick Boyle, Jeff Ubersax

The promise of synthetic biology to be instrumental in improving global quality of life and economic security can not be realized if there is not a concerted effort to transform synthetic biology innovations into useful, safe, and affordable products. As synthetic biology continues to develop, growing numbers of government and non-government organizations have focused on how synthetic biology could be used to responsibly improve global quality of life while considering environmental and health safety issues. This action plan proposes the development of measurement, performance, and safety standards for synthetic biology by a multi-stakeholder consortium as an effective way of ensuring the responsible development and wide acceptance of this technology.

Karmella Haynes

The public supports synthetic biology endeavors through tax dollars and private funding. The social mission of this action plan is to optimize the return on this public investment by facilitating the transformation of synthetic biology research into widely accessible information to support the development of new technologies. It describes the development of an incentive-driven platform to stimulate and sustain crowd-sourced data sharing. This information will support future synthetic biology endeavors and the livelihoods of students and trainees in the field.

David Kong

Synthetic biologists need great tools to realize their creative visions. Microfluidic, or “lab-on-a-chip” instrumentation has the potential to be such a foundational tool for synthetic biology. Despite numerous examples of microfluidic devices performing complex processes central to synthetic biology, ranging from automating and miniaturizing DNA synthesis to performing single cell analyses, they are not commonly used. Microfluidics are not easy to make or use, and researchers are typically unable to leverage the designs and hardware of other groups. To help address these issues I propose in this action plan to develop metafluidics, a toolkit for microfluidics.

John Cumbers

Despite ongoing scientific and technological advancements in the field of synthetic biology, there is a major bottleneck in the development of applications: design. The process of identifying the necessary components that need to be stitched together remains a laborious and time consuming task. This strategic action plan discusses the implementation of an accelerated design methodology for synthetic biology. This methodology, known as Integrated Concurrent Engineering (ICE) in the aerospace industry has cut preliminary design time at NASA from nine months to three weeks.

Keith Tyo

Synthetic Biology is a powerful technology, capable of creating low cost, effective healthcare solutions (e.g. drugs and molecular diagnostics) that could be used in extremely impoverished regions of the world. While the potential impact of Synthetic Biology, in general, is compelling, two challenges have limited this impact to date: (1) the identification of specific opportunities remains challenging, as the vast majority of Synthetic Biology practitioners live far away from the resource-poor and are not intimately aware of the problems, and (2) adequate early and mid-stage funding to pursue problem-specific technologies.